[HN Gopher] The Many Methods of Communicating with Submarines
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The Many Methods of Communicating with Submarines
Author : gumby
Score : 37 points
Date : 2020-07-19 17:34 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (hackaday.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (hackaday.com)
| supernova87a wrote:
| I love reading about stuff like this!
|
| I had 2 questions perpetually on my mind:
|
| 1) The article doesn't go into physical sonic wave communication,
| like ultrasonic I suppose. Did that ever have applications for
| submarine comms?
|
| 2) I always wonder whether like in the movies, submarines
| actually have or ever use the audible ping. Of course, it gives
| away one's position instantly, but does such a ping capability
| even exist still, on modern submarines?
| kevinskii wrote:
| I was a sonar tech on a nuclear submarine 20 years ago. I don't
| recall hearing about any ultrasonic applications. As for the
| "audible ping": Yes, such a capability exists, and it is very
| much like the movies. It is rarely used for the reason you
| mentioned.
| drtillberg wrote:
| Re: #2, that is active sonar, which is for useful for locating
| objects that are silent, e.g., rocks.[1] It also is very loud
| and disruptive for whales and dolphins.[2]
|
| [1] https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/sonar.html
|
| [2] https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4236
| supernova87a wrote:
| Ah of course, the issue several years ago when the Navy's
| testing was causing whale / dolphin strandings...
| aoki wrote:
| 1) Yes, it's nicknamed "Gertrude".
|
| 2) Yes, every tactical platform that hunts subs has an active
| sonar capability of some kind. (Hull mounted, towed, dipping,
| sonobuoys, ...) When the ambient noise floor exceeds the target
| sub's noise, you need that option.
| larrik wrote:
| > The 228,000 ocean-dwelling species that we know about
| represents about ten percent of the estimated total aquatic
| species.
|
| I don't buy it. The idea that the deep ocean is full of all this
| life we haven't plundered yet seems like a fantasy.
| nickff wrote:
| They usually make these types of estimates by looking at the
| rate of new species discovery, and assuming it will
| asymptotically approach zero.
| gerdesj wrote:
| Do you have any idea just how vast the seas are? Think about it
| for a while. Consider that we mostly bob about on top and that
| is much bigger area compared to dry land. Now allow that it
| keeps on moving and drops away to up to 11 Km deep. Our senses
| are nearly useless in this alien world. 10% is just an educated
| guess and may be woefully low.
| throw0101a wrote:
| What, nothing about NATO's JANUS?
|
| > _JANUS performance has so far been evaluated by many
| collaborating partners at centre frequencies from 900 Hz - 60 kHz
| and over distances up to 28 kilometers in waters all over the
| world._
|
| > _JANUS packet and bit error rates have been computed as
| functions of the signal to the noise ratio (SNR) and time spread
| over periods extending from hours to months. Signal correlation
| times have been computed and long-term experiments by
| CMRE(external link) in 2008 and 2009 have helped quantify
| robustness during variable environmental conditions._
|
| * http://www.januswiki.com/tiki-index.php?page=About+Janus
|
| Toolkits available under GPLv3.
|
| * https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a...
|
| * https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/telecom/wireless/nato-de...
|
| * https://robohub.org/janus-creates-a-new-era-for-digital-unde...
| FabHK wrote:
| > "It sometimes seems hard to believe that we humans have managed
| to explore so little of what we have so much of: the seas."
|
| Apparently fewer people have been to the bottom of the Mariana
| trench (between 11 and 12,732 km away from you) than to the moon
| (about 400,000 km away from you).
| RandomBacon wrote:
| Visiting the bottom of the Mariana Tench might be feasible for
| some people here.
|
| Apparently there are three slots available on a first-come-
| first-serve basis, for $750,000.
|
| https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/marianas-trench-challenge...
|
| Climbing Everest used to be a bucket list item for me, but not
| anymore after I hear how bad it's gotten over the years.
|
| Going into space seems more feasible for me than the trench,
| only $250,000.
| FabHK wrote:
| Yeah, Mt Everest... nobody goes there anymore, it's too
| crowded ;-)
|
| I happened to be in Guam in 2012 and in some dodgy dive bar
| (...) ran into the crew that took James Cameron down to
| Challenger Deep, only the second manned descent ever. Didn't
| believe them a word until I saw my couch surfing host dancing
| with Cameron.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Yeah, Mt Everest... nobody goes there anymore, it's too
| crowded ;-)
|
| Mt. Everest is the kind of place where that could be
| literally true (though I don't think it is, yet), if you
| count corpses as part the crowding...
| codezero wrote:
| I remember researching this in 2008 and I thought satellite based
| lasers were already in common usage (sending signal to specific
| known surface location and also receiving from that location
| using the surface of the ocean as the medium that the sub and
| satellite read.
|
| This was a while ago so no links maybe I'm misremembering.
| akira2501 wrote:
| The USSR used buoys extensively during the cold war. Here's a
| former naval officer describing the sonar based system:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eb6e_-HvBzw
| sparker72678 wrote:
| If you like this kind of stuff checkout "Blind Man's Bluff: The
| Untold Story Of American Submarine Espionage"
|
| There are so many fascinating details about submarine operations
| that are now unclassified (and makes you guess about what things
| are like that _are_ still hidden). From communications to the
| underground listening stations to attempting (and succeeding) in
| wire-tapping soviet communication cables, to attempting to lift a
| wrecked foreign submarine right off the ocean floor.
|
| It's an amazing read and very well written.
| fortran77 wrote:
| I worked on the Eaton AIL CVLF radio receiver, which was the one
| of the first digital radio receivers done in the late 1980s.
| Because the frequencies used to communicate with subs were around
| 19 kHz, the CPUs of the time were just fast enough to do the
| signal processing. We used the Fairchild 9445 which was
| essentially a Data General "Nova 4" on a chip.
|
| This receiver was used to receive launch commands. It received
| teletype data that was printed on a Model 29 Teletype. The
| encryption keys and the key generator used on this project were
| compromised by the Walkers, a family of spies (See
| https://news.usni.org/2014/09/02/john-walker-spy-ring-u-s-na... )
|
| The Submarines dragged a wire antenna that was used to receive
| the VLF radio signals, that were transmitted from several
| megawatt sites within the US and beyond.
| [deleted]
| SaberTail wrote:
| My favorite attempt to get the Department of Defense to pay for
| physics research is a paper that suggests building a muon storage
| ring and using that to generate a beam of neutrinos to
| communicate with submarines[1].
|
| The physical principals are pretty sound. We do already generate
| neutrino beams, like at Fermilab[2]. And we do have the ability
| to detect neutrinos in water, optically as ANTARES[3] does, or
| acoustically, as SAUND[4] demonstrated.
|
| There are some serious engineering challenges to building a muon
| storage ring, which is why we don't have any. If we could build
| them, we could build a muon collider. Muon colliders would be
| great. Muons are elementary particles, and don't have all the
| garbage inside that a proton does, and so you'd get very clean
| signals out of such a collider, unlike the LHC. And since muons
| are much heavier than electrons, it's easier to get them to very
| high energies without losing a lot of power to synchrotron
| radiation.
|
| [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/0909.4554 [2]
| https://www.fnal.gov/pub/science/particle-physics/experiment...
| [3] https://antares.in2p3.fr/Overview/index.html [4]
| http://saund.stanford.edu/saund1/
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
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